Despite the struggling economy, storage software vendor Veritas Software Corp. beat analyst estimates with fourth-quarter earnings of $64 million, or 15 cents a share.
While the earnings were a drop from $84 million, or 19 cents a share, over Q4 2000, they beat Wall Street projections of 13 cents a share, Veritas President and CEO Gary Bloom said in a conference call Tuesday.
The Mountain View, Calif., company saw revenues in the quarter that ended Dec. 31, 2001, jump to $374 million, up from $370 million a during the same time last year.
¡°We started to see improvement during the last part of the third quarter and into Q4,¡± Bloom said.
For the fiscal year 2001, revenues climbed 24 percent over the previous year, from $1.2 billion to $1.5 billion.
During the conference call, Bloom outlined other wins for the company, which also deals in disaster recovery products, including services revenue climbing 55 percent and more than 30 deals of $1 million or more.
The company also hired 263 people during the quarter, and saw its cash and investments rise to $1.7 billion, he said. The company now has 5,605 employees.
Given the positive news from the last quarter, Bloom said the company was increasing its revenue projection for Q1 2002 to $365 million to $370 million, above Wall Street estimates of $355 million.
He also said Veritas would have a better idea of the outlook for the rest of the year after the first quarter.